BY: Brittany J. Barron
Sisters at Big Sur
Big Sur stretches across Sissy’s scrapbook cover: cloudless day, azure water. In the crag, Sissy recognizes her sickness, her rotted thyroid, the one that radiation expelled when she was eighteen.
The day Mad Girl and Sissy travel to Big Sur, they drive across Bixby Creek Bridge. The marine layer coats the water. Mad Girl wants to tell Sissy, I’m sorry it’s not like your scrapbook cover.
Mad Girl wants to trade places with the white bird circling the staggering rocks. The white bird who knows when to feed, to drink, to cry out, to skirt the cliff’s edges. Mad Girl knows nothing in her thirteen-year-old body. Not how to make Sissy happy.
Nor how to tell Sissy her secret, hot like a white stone in her chest. Mad Girl clasps Sissy’s hand and wants to whisper, I will follow you, I will follow you to Big Sur, I will follow you into the water, I will follow you down to the ocean floor.
It is February, and I feel old.
Not old the way Sissy must—the way
her skeleton folds another sickness
into its frame every month. But old
as in I have lived to watch Sissy in pain
the way Moon watches Sky swallow
crimsons and golds it had once cradled.
Mama’s Hands
Mama has May hands: sweet like sunflower
petals, yellow strokes of light in the summer.
Mama’s hands raised her brothers and sisters.
She bathed their feet in the kitchen sink,
cooled their hot fists. Three died, ten survived.
Mama wears the ring Daddy gave her—its band
dented from the slammed front door.
It’s years later when he puts his hands on her.
Five rips down her shoulder. Two left scars.
Mama’s hands catch her daughter, her
ye-of-little-faith girl, her white-knuckled
Ophelia, who planted flowers with her little shovel.
Mama knows her daughter is drowning.
She twists and turns in the shallows.
Mama’s hands were meant to hold broken bird skulls,
to scatter the remains of the blackberry winter.
Born and raised in Flowery Branch, Georgia, Brittany J. Barron graduated with her MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia College, where she taught freshman composition and wrote poems about mad girls. Currently, she teaches in the College Composition Program at Florida State University.